March 9th, 2011
Wild libraries I have known: My School Libraries
For some reason when I was in high school, they decided to do away with the library. In spite of all the books and the aura of shush, we had to call the library an Information Resource Centre, or something else just as unmemorable, whose exact name I, naturally, can’t remember. The librarian– and I think, somehow, she still managed to be a librarian– was quite adamant about the name change, refusing to tolerate any lapses in terminology. If you mentioned the library, she’d blink twice as though she didn’t understand what you could possibly be talking about, then offer correction like you were an idiot. I do remember that the pride and joy of the Information Resource Centre (and the reason for the name change) was a marvelous invention called a CD ROM Tower. I also remember that my friend Mike once got suspended from school for stealing a magazine (or so went the accusation, but really, it was all just a misunderstanding).
And so you can tell that high school (which was otherwise a pretty great place, and I was lucky enough to enjoy my time there) is not the library I’m talking about. No, I am talking about my elementary school libraries, of which I had two, and at the first one, I remember as venue for visits from Dennis Lee and Phoebe Gilman, among other writers. There was a story-telling competition, which I won more than once in spite of having a speech impediment, and the prize was that you got to be recorded on video tape, which was exciting even though we didn’t have a VCR. I remember molesting the paperback novels, discovering a heroine called Jo who I automatically loved because of associations with The Facts of Life. I remember our teacher librarian, who was called Mrs. Free, and that I coveted her affections. And that I dreamed of being old enough to be a library helper and undertake mysterious library tasks during recesses and at lunch hour.
I moved to another school before I had the chance, however, and was somewhat dismayed to find myself friendless and ridiculed. And so when I was finally able to become a library helper, the place was my sanctuary, a splendid alternative to recess outside and alone in the cold. I can’t remember what I did as a library helper, but the experience was one of the high points in a bleak little life. I remember revolving racks of paperbacks, discovering The Westing Game, wondering why they didn’t have any books by VC Andrews, being obsessed with novels about girls with anorexia (having by then outgrown my fascination with YA-friendly Holocaust fiction), date stamps and ink pads, call numbers typed on a typewriter and taped on paperback spines. I remember I once lied to my friends and said a boy had kissed me behind a copy of The Great Gilly Hopkins, and I am sure that none of my friends (by then, I had a few) believed me. I remember that at this school, the library was a room just like any other classroom, but that the books lining its walls and creating diversions in the floor plan had transformed it into another world.
School libraries are the wildest libraries out there, used by children high on ADHD, white-out and about-to-be raging hormones. Much more domestic spaces than the public library, somehow being at home brings out the worst in its patrons, and they come in twenty-five at a time, a single-filed massive, just like they own the place, because they do. It’s the most magical room in the school.
February 16th, 2011
Wild libraries I have known: The Whitby Public Library
My childhood is lost to me, and so is its library. Which is not the library pictured here, the Whitby Carnegie Library. That one was “the old library”, now dental clinic, or something, but it recently came as a shock to me realize that my library is now the old library too. As lost to the physical world as it is to my memory, but first let me tell you about the fragments I have shored against the ruins.
I remember that the Whitby Public Library had very few windows, and it had the vibe of a basement, but this never bothered me, because it was the library. I used to go and check out chapter books, stack them on my bedside table and rotate through the entire stack one chapter after another. Someone once suggested that this was a strange way to approach a pile of books, and I couldn’t fathom what they were talking about. I used to dog-ear my pages. I used to read the last page first.
The Whitby Public Library had a cable access show whose theme song was some guy strumming a guitar and singing the lyric, “Strawberries, fresh strawberries. Cream and sugar, you just can’t wait!” Or something like that– perhaps I dreamed the whole thing. But I distinctly remember learning to draw a 3-dimensional-seeming chair after viewing a lessons on such things on the library show. I remember that the Chief Librarian was also an author, and he was Ken Roberts, who’d written Pop Bottles and Hiccup Champion of the World.
I hardly remember the library, in spite of its centrality to my early existence (and the centrality I do remember. The library was always a place of reverence). So I was excited to rediscover it via Google, make it truly a Wild library I have known (instead of a wild library I can scarcely recollect), except then I discovered that the library had been torn down. In fact, that it hadn’t even been a library at all. When the old library (pictured above) outgrew itself, the Whitby Public Library was moved into a temporary location in a former municipal building where it would live for nearly thirty years.
When a brand new state of the art library was opened in 2005 (and it is impressive. I’d include a photo, except it’s a library I’ve never known), the library of my childhood was reduced to rubble.
January 27th, 2011
Wild Libraries I have known: Spadina Road (TPL)
I once wrote a love letter to the Spadina Road Library, when I was coming out of the throes of the post-partum life and incredibly grateful for how the library and its staff had supported me through that period. Eighteen months later, I think I can address the subject with the benefit of perspective, and I say this: If not for the Spadina Road Library, I would be dead, or something very close to it.
Self-serve checkout machines are being installed at libraries across the city, and it makes me sad when I remember the days when the Spadina Road libarians were the only human beings I spoke to. And I pity the poor library patron in the throes of her own personal something who has to make do with a device that scans and beeps, instead of the lovely men and women who recognized me, asked me how my day was going, told me that my acne-covered pickled pig of a newborn was adorable. The library became my destination in an otherwise aimless life, and it meant everything to me.
These days, my local library branch has become a portal to the world, the hub of my community. And living in a city of millions, community is so very precious, so hubs like this are terribly necessary (and take note, Toronto City Council. Every penny you spend on your library system builds a better city). When I go to the library, I run into friends from the neighbourhood, I meet the new friends we’ve made through the library’s children’s programming, I pick up the books I’ve reserved through TPL’s inter-library system which are delivered like a miracle to a patron’s local branch. I meet the librarian who I continue to credit with teaching me to engage with my newborn through songs and games, which can’t help but be the reason for how well we’re doing today. We may see Cindy working at the reference desk, who is only the fourth person in the entire universe that Harriet refers to by name (after Mommy, Daddy and Elmo). We check out CDs and DVDs, and browse the stacks for picture books, and cookbooks, and guidebooks for our upcoming trip to the UK.
The Spadina Road library has become a second home, and we’re not the only ones, because our little branch is always busy with school groups visiting, patrons using the internet, people studying, kids playing, people seeking information all of kinds, and also, yes, a few desperate people (like I once was) seeking a touchstone, the sound of a human voice, and never failing to find one.
January 13th, 2011
Wild Libraries I have known: John W. Graham (Trinity College)
The first day of my final year of undergraduate studies was Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and I remember sitting out on my rooftop patio the evening before, gazing at the city skyline, imagining that I really was smoking those cigarettes, and wishing something interesting would happen. The morning after notwithstanding, even, my wish was granted by the eight months that followed. I lived in a wonderful apartment with two beloved friends, and we had fun parties, elaborate suppers, hilarious adventures and misadventures, and sustained all night study sessions by runs to the 7-11 for Jolt Cola. We stayed up other nights editing school papers, writing newspaper back page columns, essays on Dryden’s All for Love, indulging in melodrama, kissing boys strange and otherwise, strumming guitars, and talking, talking, talking.
It was a wonderful year in which everything I touched turned to gold, and the sun was shining all the time, even when it wasn’t. And even when it wasn’t was sometimes because of my Cold War History seminar, which challenged me like none of my university courses ever had (and the way all of them should have). I loved the course, the discussion was great, the material was fascinating. Our professor was Margaret MacMillan, the year before she published Paris 1919 and won the Samuel Johnson Prize. She was formidable, brilliant, and her standards were high, but I was incapable of meeting them. That I managed to do so eventually made me prouder than almost anything else I’d done.
Our course readings were on reserve at the John W. Graham Library at UofT’s Trinity College, to be read in the library only. Now, it goes against everything I believe in to have any admiration for Trinity College (I went to the much preferable Victoria), but their new library had just opened that year, and it was lovely. Stately chairs in front of roaring fires, everything a beautiful dark wood, perfect lighting, brand new carrels where I’d take my readings too. In that library, I’d meet my other classmates, and we were always waiting for one another to be finished, and it was always late at night. I remember reading, reading about Kruschev’s Secret Speech, the Hungarian Revolution, Yalta, fellow-travellers, glasnost, the Prague Spring. I remember working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, the discussions that we had and the work that I produced making me feel like something of an actual scholar for the first time (and the last). I remember leaving the library as they were closing up, jumping on my bike and riding off to somewhere in crisp, cold night air, and I remember how the stars looked, even though I might just be imagining them now. I remember an awareness that I was living through an extraordinary era in my own life, that things would never be so clear again, or so easy. Life then was delivered to us on a plate, but we knew it was ending come the springtime. It was impossible to imagine what would happen after that.
What I remember most is the smell of the John W. Graham Library, more palpably than I remember anything else about it. A new building redolence, of fresh paint and new wood that only looked ancient. It smelled like a hot stack of photocopies and not remotely like a book. I came to associate that smell with everything about that year, when were standing on the threshold of the rest of our lives, and if I could smell it now, I think I’d cry. I really would, because of how lovely it was and how young we all were, so ridiculously and unknowingly earnest.
But new smell only lasts so long. When I returned to Toronto in 2005, I went back to the library so see if I could find it again, and was disappointed to find it smelled like anywhere. And of course, I was standing in the very same place, but it wasn’t the same at all.
December 16th, 2010
Wild Libraries I have known: EJ Pratt Library
I wish I had a picture of the EJ Pratt Reading Room pre-2001, when the carpets were yellow and the ceilings were high, and I knew every single person at work at every row of tables, because it was Saturday night, and this was UofT. About every twenty minutes, I’d go to the bathroom, and talk to someone different in there about whoever we were in unrequited love with, and how “Colourblind” by Counting Crows was a really good song. You could sign out a laptop computer from the circulation desk, and they were always infected with viruses.
Never, ever has there been a library I have known like I’ve known the EJ Pratt Library at Victoria College at UofT. I worked there as a student assistant from 1999-2002, back when I was doing my undergrad and thought wearing tie dye was a good idea. On at least two occasions, I snogged somebody in the stacks. (That I can write the previous sentence is the greatest accomplishment in my life to date.) I remember working my Saturday morning shifts hungover and wearing pajama pants, I remember how there was always a friend to talk to when I was working at the circulation desk (and how then I always got in trouble), I remember perverts on the internet, the woman with no limbs and her blind husband (and how they used to come in and sleep the day away, and students would complain because they smelled.)
The first year I worked at the EJ Pratt Library, the building was glorious in its circa 1961 decor. We loved it. The elevator needed a key to work, so we used to transport the books up and down in a dumbwaiter. There was a wall of card catalogues. The reading room stretched on forever. There was a distinct absence of comfortable chairs, and some of us liked it that way. We didn’t have access to the internet at the circ desk, and I have no idea now how we passed the time.
The second year, the library was under renovations, and housed in a temporary location. The new circ desk had the internet, if you happened to be lucky enough to get the good chair. Sometimes I worked in a room with a gorgeous view of the sun setting over the Royal Ontario Museum, and the pervert on the internet would come in, but I was never sure about how to approach him. I remember I was working the night Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman broke up, and I found the news particularly shocking.
The next year, the library was home again, but the home was completely different. To be honest, I can only remember tiny details of its previous incarnation, so realized was its future self. The reading room was smaller and less satisfying, but there were carrels with doors that shut, and then eventually they had to take the doors off due to bad behaviour. The fresh new wood of the carrels and study tables proved tempting for artistic sensibilities, and cartoon penises began to be ubiquitous, and sometimes they were carved in, so never mind the scrubbing. But. The library was wonderful. The east wall on the second floor had a view of the Lester B Pearson Garden of Peace and Understanding, and outlets all along the wall so you could plug in (because everyone had their own laptop by then). Downstairs, there was a student lounge, that you could eat in and everything, and there was even a snack machine– this was controversial. We loved the orange wall. We loved the natural light. We also loved that all the circ stations had internet access now.
I also loved helping to unpack in the weeks before the “new” library opened, the downstairs stacks with a view of Queens Park turning into autumn. I also got to go down to the sub-basement and help put away special collections, the Canadiana, Coleridge’s Library, and Virginia Woolf collections (and yes, my life is richer not just for snogs in stacks, but because I have touched books that Virginia Woolf touched, and even wrote her name in). The EJ Pratt sub-basement is the most magical place in the world, even more so than its reading room pre-2001.
I returned to the library in 2005, now weaned of tie-dye, newly married, and enrolled in graduate school. It felt wonderful to come home again, but something had changed while I was gone– no longer were there constantly friends to gossip with at the circ desk, and the students had become younger (and actually they had, Ontario cutting out the fifth year of high school, but I’m sure that wasn’t all of it). Suddenly all the tasks I’d detested as an undergraduate student assistant become much coveted– I loved shelf-reading, going through the stacks book-by-book and finding any that had been filed out of place. It was a rescue operation! Moreover, what treasures did I find while thumbing through much of that entire library. For a short while I also had fun keeping track of the books being held by sleeping people, though that wasn’t part of my job description. I loved shelving– I could have shelved for hours. Part of this because I could go off to the stacks, and no one would care if I didn’t return for ages. I also think having had a real job in the meantime had changed my attitude somewhat. (Before I’d been much too busy wearing pajamas, and talking about who’d had sex with who the night before in the Burwash quad.)
I love the EJ Pratt Library. I’ve been back many times since graduating (again), and it’s always a little bit like coming home. I return for its book sale annually. I was excited to read in the most recent alumni magazine that there is a new “reading garden” near the entrance, and I think it will be deserving of a field trip come spring. I’ll bring Harriet on a sunny day, then we’ll hang out for a while in the quad, the trees keeping the sounds of the city at bay, and all the years I’ve ever known in that place will culminate in yet another singular magical moment.
Note: Pratt Library makes an appearance in Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat. I’d be interested to know of any other literary places where it’s turned up.
December 2nd, 2010
Wild Libraries I have known: Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch
Things must have changed in Peterborough since I lived there last, because this morning I took a look at their website and discovered that they were open every day. This surprised me, because what I remember most about the Peterborough Public Library (in addition to the donut shop installed near the newspapers in the late 1990s) was the number of times I walked up the steps to the library only to discovered it was closed.
Now, in reality, the Peterborough Public Library’s Delafosse Branch is up there with the moving sidewalk at the Spadina Subway Station, Ontario Place, and hope for the future– it’s just another one of those things there used to be money for once upon a time. When I consulted the Peterborough Public Library website this morning, I discovered that the Delafosse Branch is only open fifteen hours a week, and I remember it being under threat of closure once or twice before. But no matter.
I have never ever visited the Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch. However, with its exotic-sounding name, the illusion it gave of a library system with branches (multiple, instead of just one that was starved for funding), and the fact that my vision of it was never sullied by reality, the Delafosse Branch has become a stand-in for the library of my dreams. The Delafosse Library was open every day, and long into the night, had cozy fireplaces with nearby armchairs to curl up in, all the books in the Babysitters Club series, and the Anne books too. No one had drawn cartoon penises on its carrels, and the people who came in and slept all day on the study tables didn’t smell like pee.
The staff were well-adjusted, only the male librarians had facial hair, overdue fines flew away with wings, and the lost books were always where you left them. The library stools never had footprints. If you studied there, you were guaranteed to get an A. They were always dying to hire you as a part-time shelver. Mis-shelved books were unheard of, and the computers never went down. There were terminals enough for everyone to check their email. There was always a pen for you to borrow. They’d kept the card-catalogues in case anyone felt the urge to thumb through index cards, and many people did. Any book you needed you’d locate by climbing up a ladder, and the acoustics were such that though joy and laughter filled the place, no one ever had to say, “Shhh.”
November 26th, 2010
Wild Libraries I Have Known: The Nottingham Central Library
In 2002, overwrought and in disgrace, I ran away from home (for the second time in one summer) to live in England and work for a while on a working holiday-maker’s visa. I ended up in Nottingham, which was neither here nor there, quite the Midlands indeed, because I lacked the wherewithal and financial resources to take on a city like London. I had $400 in my bank account, which dwindled to nothing before I got a temporary job stuffing envelopes at a driving school. I was living in a bottom bunk of a dormitory at a backpacker’s hostel, where the bathroom tiles crawled under your feet, and everybody was having sex with everybody else, except that I wasn’t and, for once in my life, this was purely a matter of choice.
So you can see that life was a bit unsettled, that there was no centre to cannot hold and things had already fallen apart. The point then was to put it all back together, and the reconstruction began with my library card. I can’t remember the day I got my card, or how it came about, but I imagine that it had something to do with a mobile phone bill linking me a Nottingham address (however transient). And then suddenly, I had a Central anything, an axis for my tilting world, which was beginning to be righted again.
For our first date, which was on a Wednesday night nearly eight years ago, my husband and I met at the bus stop in the photo above, in front of the Nottingham Central Library. It was from the library that I signed out novel after novel because I had no money for books, and even after I had money for books, I didn’t stop my library habit. Sadly, the only novel I vividly remember signing out was Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke, because there was so much vivid about that time that it’s all sort of a blur, but I remember that I was always reading. I remember rushing down to the City Centre on my lunch breaks to use the library internet for a fifteen minute block (and how could my internet habits have ever been that? When did it change, and why didn’t I notice?). To check my email, send missives home, check out the Globe and Mail homepage to see what was going on back in Canada, to update my early-twenties dirty-laundry-airing blog. I remember using the library to do research for an article I was determined to write and to publish, except that I didn’t know how to write or get published, and now I use that point as a gauge between here and now just to determine how far I’ve come.
It’s trite but true– the Nottingham Central Library provided me with shelter when the rest of the world was anything but. It provided me access, connection, and a place to belong, and I’m not sure what might have happened to me without it.
